The new vice president at Caliper Technologies is having her cake and eating it too.
Susan Evans, who took up the reins of VP of product development, wears two hats: one of manager, and the other, scientist.
“One of the nice things about being at Caliper is that I get to do both,” Evans says. “That’s one of the advantages about being in a smaller company that has such a strong science and technology foundation. In the end you’re not only managing the business aspects but the technical side too.”
Evans brings to the seven-year-old, Mountain View, Calif.-based company experience from LifeScan, a Johnson & Johnson company, where she was vice president of R&D; she also worked at clinical diagnostic firm Dade Behring as a senior veep.
Despite 20 years of research and product development in the medical diagnostic industry, Evans was lured to Caliper by its palm-sized chips. “It’s an exciting new technology,” she says. “It’s a technology that not only has the potential of applications in the research market and high-throughput screening market, but also in clinical diagnostics.”
She believes her in-depth understanding of the diagnostics market could usher Caliper’s technology into that field, where higher throughput, miniaturization, efficiency, accuracy, and quality are vital.
— Jasmin Chua